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Contusion Not a Rind.

An extract

By PETER LARKIN.

Note: This poem is dedicated to the richly wooded terrain west of Berkswell (Warwickshire) and especially Sixteen-Acre Wood where HS2 is currently gouging its way beside and across.

WHAT WAS ONCE aligned larching knows a new unapparent lunge―――mechanic plantation plunges into new exception to give adjacent acceleration its need―――rindless lineation

A harsh treed space at the diminution―――interruption of two impositions, one at the rate of rinds of growth, the other the applied abstraction of bolting a landscape to its dread shots

Trees over the edge of get a setting―――to sow my leaf a seed that can’t be outspread on earth―――an only access pitch thrust beyond its entrances―――in the wake of its own compliance, hedged brittly awake

Firming a persistent second strand of lineation which this plantation already was―――now snapped out at its wired green continuances

Wrecked the inter-denominational threads of cross-scape―――webs that don’t allow a next plane such immediate access

Not next encroaching but nearer encoaching―――a trajectory prime thrust without residue, not even a contrary strewing this near―――cued to this gear

If plantations disforested this ground, can’t now recall rails to any other amendment, amoundment―――here clearance is not even its own new cutting―――alien alignments less any foray―――unbestowed upstream influence

Torn by an unaffordable refuge, to be an innovatory bystander not born of any peripheral recognition―――fresh imperturbables will race past its blank (green) windows―――soft median ingrown trees, curtailed from any windward coarsening―――speed shutters for the worsening

Silently exhumed in a stark preparative for noise―――the impact will have already vanished before its exactly naked absorbance―――trees with such directional intentions sheerly (scarcely) accoutred

Can anything bear down lightly on future (upright) reeds of scope, a layup for the self-arrival of green sticks?―――a sheen of interfoliage,  invitations everywhere, to be a presage less any traversal?

To stand knowing, trip-bestowing, amid a litter of acquainted trees―――quartered against their own thriving, not yet reduced enough to bury this their counter-spurn

A purposed scrape over ground-moss, congealed leaves, occasions of passage ferried minus warp (curl) onto universal directness―――global levels of acceleration rapid enough for body but not avid enough for breath

A ground-smack only initial?―――what purport for surfaces of the new rindlessness?―――pactive transmission has no other wrinkle―――the new accelerative peace of running on our elsewheres, lineside suspension of contrition―――hyper-retention of the incision, any associate statics strict invisibles

Every tree implicated in contrary abatement, dead-end carriage of their own hacked passage―――accounts of injected leeway no longer need to expound―――any rebound only as rigidly perishable as the trees

Deceptions of high-speed corridor can only be stationary, provincial, interruptibles of blinked consequence―――a shafted plantation is put to flight in its outlay incidence

Exact single shift now deprived of other frugal consistencies, of pleading for rind where clotting is a located refreshment―――a horniness which binds ligament to ligament in a semi-flexed (seasonal) landscape

A railway’s strictures too far, surplus immediate attainment―――solely a rind’s is local content, foreshortened, pleated not contused―――unsaturated but a sated skin, not infused or smoothed abroad

Between spokes at speed amid spikes of a fixed tide―――the whole contrast as such totters toward tertiary flexing and niching―――global distances sue for some local additive

Given the plantation can’t hide, can only slide past its altered demarcation, distortions that no longer proffer to tremble at the root―――retreat dissembles and disanoints―――or at the horizon of some recession in the disassociation

Latent marginality at its fierce gleaning―――transdisposition of neighbourhood―――the bias of a hill dashed onto a plate, either flank is concentric platform

Incompatible linkages, a mask for the entire landscape, one supreme inter-disruption――― obsolete hinter-instructions, ante-exception

A train of synchronisations added by line on line, former names missing their patchwork―――speed pure fretwork, the set-forward of any location surpassed

Ascribe our landscape to the length of our universe, din of the world’s carried flesh―――tree-fabric is transitional season, trains the rubric upon a transit of seizure

Local alignment betwinned at the symmetry’s dash-through, permanent elisions―――a plantation left alone with its re-cranked pores, breathing the fleeing intervals


Peter Larkin contributed to The Ground Aslant: an Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (2011). Among his more recent poetry collections are City Trappings (Housing Heath or Wood; 2016) and Introgression Latewood (2017). A symposium on his work was held at Warwick University (UK) in 2018; the proceedings appeared in the Journal of British & Irish Innovative Poetry. A collection, Trees Before Abstinent Ground was published in late 2019 and Encroach to Resume was published by Shearsman Books in 2021. An archive of his Fortnightly work is here.

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